In recent years, we've seen many advances from typical imperative configuration of Linux distributions to more sophisticated declarative configuration systems. NixOS takes a different path to achieve declarative configuration than current widely used state-of-art configuration management systems. By redefining how we package software today using Nix package manager, Linux distribution is configured stateless without examining current state of configuration on the machine.
During the talk, we'll be looking at concepts behind NixOS stack and I'll show some real world examples of usage.
Following technologies will be presented:
Nix, a purely functional package manager. This means that it can ensure that an upgrade to one package cannot break others, that you can always roll back to previous version, that multiple versions of a package can coexist on the same system, and much more.
NixOS, a Nix-based Linux distribution. Thanks to Nix, it supports atomic upgrades, rollbacks and multi-user package management, and it has a declarative approach to system configuration management that makes it easy to reproduce a configuration on another machine.
NixOps, a tool for deploying NixOS machines in a network or cloud.
Speakers: Domen Kožar